


Multi (no myth, tale or hero's journey)

by odoridango



Series: Tell It Like It Is [2]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: M/M, Mind Games, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-16
Updated: 2014-07-16
Packaged: 2018-02-09 02:31:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1965585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/odoridango/pseuds/odoridango
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Erwin learns that often times, children are the heroes of legends for a reason.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Multi (no myth, tale or hero's journey)

“Humanity’s Hope”, he supposes, is not the most accurate epithet for Eren. From what he’s gleaned of Levi’s reports and his own endeavors to increase personal contact with the new recruit, Eren’s modus operandi has very little to do with hope, if at all. He isn’t optimistic either, despite his steadfast dreams of reaching the ocean, of seeing the world far beyond what little land lies enclosed in the walls, of ending the war on titans in his lifetime. It’s bigger than Erwin has ever dreamed, really. But it’s quite clear that Eren works on a kind of stubbornness, a kind of denial, the refusal to accept fate, the refusal to accept defeat. He was expected to die, in Shiganshina, in Trost, so he lived and became one of the most difficult to kill of them all.

“I was in a titan stomach once,” Eren says off-handedly, on one of their not-so-accidental early morning meetings. He has all of his limbs this time, but he’s particularly restless and subdued, dimmed somehow. His breakfast is practically untouched. They’d run into the morbid topic of human frailty, and the easiness of death. “I think that’s the worst. Just sinking in, feeling your wounds burn in the acid, bits of yourself floating away…I wasn’t alone either, there were a lot of body parts and bodies in there with me. And this girl was crying for her mother…” He’s got a dead-eyed stare; he probably had nightmares like the rest of them.

“I thought I was going to die,” Eren admits with a short laugh, and says nothing more on the subject.

He’s quite the extraordinary young man, in personality if nothing else, buoyed by his sheer force of will, his anger and desperation. It makes him both easy and difficult to use, because even as he forms habits and makes routine, he is at times unpredictable. Mouth closed around the end of Erwin’s fork, peering up through his lashes, Eren seems to know how to play, how to be played, and Erwin wonders if he learned that in the shantytowns clustered close to the walls, where the Maria refugees clustered and lived in squalor. But he only plays with Erwin, he’s noticed. Eren might know how to play, but mostly he chooses not to, _chooses_ to be bald and frank and upfront, to risk offence with his shameless honesty and bluntness, and it’s a wonder to Erwin, who chooses to play all day, every day, for the rest of his military career. Choosing to forsake that caution, to throw it to the wind, to leave oneself unguarded even as one has the supply and capability to build a fortress, is incomprehensible, unimaginable, and so very Eren, or so Erwin thinks.

That kind of freedom, that kind of bravery, effortless as it is to the boy, is what Erwin thinks should be celebrated.

“You’re young,” Erwin tells Eren at night, lantern held aloft in the dark of the basement. “But sometimes I think the young are wiser than the old.”

Eren frowns, at him from inside the bars. “Almost everyone I know is young,” he says. “The oldest person I know is Pixis.”

Children. Left behind or thrown away, raising each other in the Sina underground or in labor camps and agricultural centers, running amok on the streets before going home to huddle around fires, or, if they’re lucky, to beautiful mothers who can cook a hot meal. Soldiers, baby-faced and still soft in their middles, split open on rocks during training on the wires, bitten in half by titans and swallowed whole in turns. Statistically speaking, he’s not sure how many of them survive to become seasoned officers and how many of them become fodder, numbers of dead or injured or unknown, unfound. Eren, trapped between a perennial youth that springs from his enthusiasm, his vigor, and the bone-deep tiredness that seeps from his nightmares and dreams, a boy who refuses to guard the nape of his neck from the axe that might tear into it, refuses on simple principle.

There is a beauty in simplicity, in tragedy, in narratives of strength, charisma and futility, and Erwin would read them to Eren if he could, would write the boy volumes, just to show him that beauty, to show what he captures in the flick of his eyelashes, the nervous twitch in his right hand where he traces invisible scars on the meat of his palm, the passion that flares bright and sharp in his voice. But the boy is a storyteller, not a reader, gesturing with his hands when he speaks, face animated and vibrant when he talks to his friends, expressions passing fast and easy across his face. Occasionally, Erwin, too, feels snared by his tales, falls for the idea of hope wrapped around the boy, the idea that he himself built and shored and cultivated, carefully, bittersweetly, waiting for protest and riot and fire in the streets.

“I like fairy tales,” Eren says, brushes his fingers across the spines lined neatly on the bookshelves of the small library. “I like telling them. They’re supposed to contain lessons, or something. But they’re actually pretty brutal.”

He looks at Erwin. There is no princess, no dragon, no tower, no white knight or prince or huntsman, no magic to save them or help them solve their problems. All they have is this boy, and the viciousness that seethes under his skin.

“I like to think that our lives are colorful enough,” Erwin murmurs, tracks him as he flits from aisle to aisle.

“They aren’t,” Eren says, very firm and very belligerent.

Brutal fairy tales and the brutal boys raised on them. Erwin could do to learn a little more about legends and myths of that kind, he thinks.

**Author's Note:**

> Not really mind games, but sorta kinda, lol there's a reason why this series is named what it's named you know. 
> 
> For eruren week, Day 2: intimacy/modesty/secrecy


End file.
